The Iris Set Ablaze

There is a moment before recognition, when an eye is still just a shape, and this work lives exactly there. A single gaze, drawn monumental and comic book bold, fills the surface almost edge to edge, the lashes radiating outward like a burst of light around a centre that refuses to look away.

Nothing here is printed or painted. The lashes, the rim of the lid, the fine radial lines of the iris, all of it exists because material was taken away, not added. Controlled scratches open the surface of the deep red coloured mirror glass, and where the glass stays untouched it holds the darkness, dense and unbroken, so the eye seems to rise directly out of the void around it.

Red is not a background choice here, it is the temperature of the whole piece. It is the flush of a look held a beat too long, the warmth just under the skin of a feeling that has not yet been named, the colour a gaze turns when it is finally set ablaze rather than merely open.

Up close, the eye dissolves into a field of individual marks, thin, deliberate, catching whatever light finds them. Step back and they resolve again into lash, lid and iris, whole and watching. The image is always there, present in the glass itself, and light does not create it. It sharpens it, deepening the contrast without ever making the eye appear or disappear.

Because the surface is mirrored, the room around it, and the person standing in front of it, are pulled into the reflection between the scratches. You do not simply look at this eye. For a moment, it looks back with your own face caught inside it, and looking becomes a kind of exchange rather than a one way act.

The Iris Set Ablaze continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part. This work is unique.

"An eye that does not close, in a red that does not cool."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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